Look at your elbow.

Danced Five Rhythms last night for the first time in ages. Brilliant. I’ll try to explain why. 5 Rhythms is free expressive dance moving through five rhythmic moods, flow, staccato, chaos, stillness and another I can’t remember, but this is just my take on it. 95% of the time my body takes orders, lift that cup, walk to the fridge, open the door, that sort of thing; an endless stream of orders from my CPU that it complies with in silent obedience. So much so it’s easy to think that’s the natural way of things. And it stands, walks and sits in the ways of the person my CPU thinks I am. An actor for example will want to get the walk of his character right to know who he is. And in my daily routine my knees and elbows, hips and back will move in very limited ways to lift that cup, kick the dog etc. You only have to look at your elbow to realise how limited its daily use is. Now it’s recently been shown that one’s brain exhibits the same activity when watching other people move as it does when we move in the same way. That must mean my body mind has a massive store of other people’s movements, a short list being Beyonce, Keith Flint (Fire Starter) and that bossy woman in Tesco’s etc. that don’t occur in my daily cup lifting exploits. My body therefore has this imaginative cornucopia of movements and a capacity to move far beyond what I ordinarily use. It’ is massively frustrated. And it so wants to play in this wonderland of movements and experience the being-ness behind them; kind of like playing everyman. So for a brief while my body holds sway and tells my CPU of all the passions and foibles ‘out there’ that, in its concern for being me, it’s unaware of. And somehow all these passions and foibles come home and I recognise them as part of me often ignored and subdued by my petty considerations of who I am. So thanks body for all the messages and my body says thanks too for its chance to speak.